Wake
by willowscribe
Summary: "Steve has always lived two lives. There's the life he has in the present – in his scrawny, broken body, living in a hovel on the fifth floor of a ramshackle Brooklyn apartment building – and there's the life he has when he dreams." Is it possible to fall in love with a dream?


**The work is part of the Cap/Iron Man Tiny Reverse Big Bang 2018. It was inspired by an absolutely gorgeous piece of artwork by Jayjayverse, which can be viewed on the capim-tinybang tumblr or on AO3. (Due to FFN's restrictions, I cannot provide direct links, but I highly encourage you to look up the original art piece.)**

 **This work is cross-posted on AO3 and my tumblr. As always, feedback is welcomed and cherished.**

 _Wake_

Steve has always lived two lives. There's the life he has in the present – in his scrawny, broken body, living in a hovel on the fifth floor of a ramshackle Brooklyn apartment building – and there's the life he has when he dreams.

When he dreams, sickly becomes strong, wheezing becomes shouting, loneliness turns to _team_.

When he dreams, he is in perfect health. He is a foot taller and about one hundred pounds heavier, and he can run for miles and miles without stopping to catch his breath. When he dreams, Steve has friends that he works with and lives with and trains with.

In real life, Steve can barely afford to make rent, and with Bucky halfway across the world with the 107th, he is more isolated than ever before. Even the bullies who used to beat on him are gone, and Steve knows rationally that most of them – even Bucky – won't be coming back alive.

War is brutal like that.

He draws, sometimes. Images of faces he can't name but can identify as _friend_ , images of a Manhattan that looks nothing like the one on the other side of the East River, images of a humanoid form that reminds Steve of the Tin Man from _The Wizard of Oz_ , only the robot in his dreams can fly and shoot beams from its hands. The images all rattle around inside his head, and sometimes Steve wakes up and feel like he can't _breathe_ unless he manages to put them to paper. He has an entire wall of his apartment dedicated to his art. Sometimes Steve feels like he's putting together the pieces of a puzzle, only he doesn't know what image the puzzle is supposed to make.

He doesn't know their names, but he traces his hands over the darkly inked lines of their faces: the woman with hair like fire, the man clad in a cape clutching a hammer, the archer peering intently down from a perch high in a warehouse-like building, the demure curly-haired man who cringes away from his own shadow.

The last of the five is the one Steve draws the most often. The man's sharp features and intelligent eyes form the basis of Steve's muse, and he draws the man over and over again until he is certain that he could replicate the exact pattern of freckles on his nose from memory alone. He is beautiful. Steve knows this objectively. Sometimes he finds himself staring at the man's strong brow and the bow of his upper lip, wondering what it would be like to see his face in motion. He can almost taste the frenetic energy that would follow the man around, the air practically crackling with it.

This may be why Steve always chooses to draw the man in quiet moments – when the man thinks he is alone, perhaps, looking intently at some technology Steve can't begin to understand, chewing on his lower lip, a pen tucked behind his ear. It is these moments, when the man is at peace, that Steve finds himself falling a little bit in love with.

It doesn't make sense. It shouldn't be possible to fall in love with a person you've made up inside your head. It's not real love. It's a fantasy, a dream, an ideal. Steve knows this, rationally.

But he also feels as if he knows this man. It is as if one day he sprang into Steve's mind fully formed, not a figment of Steve's imagination but a true insertion of an entire separate human being's consciousness into Steve's own dreams.

Nonetheless, Steve knows he can't allow himself to fall in love with a notebook's worth of drawings. As much as he loves his dreams – where he has a healthy body, where he has true friends from all walks of life, where he can hold the mystery man tight and feel his warm body shifting underneath Steve's arms, no longer a static image on a page – Steve also knows that he cannot let the dreams stop him from living.

He tries to move on. He sweeps Mr Miller's shop every day and takes home his wage in an envelope, stopping to buy some bread if he can afford to splurge on a freshly-baked loaf. He goes on one date with a girl named Junie and never sees her again. He buys the newspaper every morning and scans it for any news of the 107th, praying both that he will and won't have an update on Bucky. On occasion, he wallows in his loneliness, but the dreams visit him at night and help him imagine a world where maybe, just maybe, health and friendship and _love_ are all possible.

Sometimes when he dreams, he thinks he hears a voice calling out to him. "Steve," the voice says faintly, as if Steve is hearing it from underwater. "Steve, please. Steve, come back to me. Steve, please wake up. Steve, Steve, Steve –"

And Steve somehow knows the name behind the voice, even though it threatens to escape him, so he claws his way through the twisted physics of a dreamscape and whispers, "Tony," in return.

"Please, Steve, wake up," the voice he's identified as Tony pleads. "I need you to come home, okay? I love you, you utter bastard, and I never told you before but I am now, so please, if you love me, please just _wake up_."

…

Steve wakes up.


End file.
